7 games in 7 days: rewarded video

Have you decided to release your game under iOS? So read on. Yachts, cars, villas - all this will be yours. The main thing is to marry successfully. And game developers remain the freedom and happiness of creativity. Sic!

Yes, roll your lip and remember, every day more than 1000 games are laid out in the apple store. Imagine that some type-gamer enters the Appstore once a week to see the latest applications. He is waiting for 7 * 1000 = 7000 new games. And a million old ones that he did not try. He scrolls through 3 pages with icons and descriptions, sees 3 dozen applications, reads reviews and downloads himself a pair of free toys. What is the likelihood that he will see your ingenious, unheard of, epoch-making, mind-blowing app? Small? Oh, you're from the mat. statistics? Come on?! And do not worry. Good luck and advertising will save you. Release 100 applications, place in them modern advertizing and 50 dollars a day to you are provided to the death.
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I will tell you how this ingenious plan is carried out by the author, publish the financial results of 2015 (ton-s-s), and inform dear readers about advertising services that, in my opinion, are the most fashionable and profitable this season. I don’t give links to applications, I don’t touch anyone, I’m fixing the Primus stove.

How to produce entities

First of all, practice. Know the application is considered ready when it is posted to the store. I remember in the spring I released 7 habro-articles on a common topic: 1 week - 1 game . I do not know why I did it, apparently, avitaminosis. I almost lost my mind, lost health, work and beloved woman. After a couple of weeks I returned everything doubly, but I am not going to repeat more experiments of this kind. By the way, after half a year, after rethinking the mistakes, I easily buried 7 applications in the store in 7 days. Not straining. Probably well rested. Island of Brac . And, the basic principle of development - a new project must start from scratch. Bricks from past projects to connect as needed. Redoing is much more expensive than rebuilding.

Promotion of free apps

Reviews, spam, beautiful pictures - all ashes. Thrown money. The only way I use is to keep all applications paid for a couple of weeks ($ 1) and I declare them free for three days. On such days, depending on the location of the stars, I get from 10 to 1000 downloads per application. 1000 downloads over time becomes extremely rare luck.

I follow the paid state. In 2015, two applications suddenly became buyable. 5-20 purchases per day, an average of $ 10 per day. I do not touch them, pah-pah-pah.
One thing, by the way, was made in the framework of the project 7 games in 7 weeks (Frogger HD).

Eternally paid applications

There are such - this application is tied to the sport. Buy hockey and biathlon in the days of the World Cup, world championships, the start of the season in the NHL. All paid applications brought in $ 3000 per year.

Card games

This is a separate topic, card games are free, I hardly touch them, because I have 10-100 downloads per day in total. Players who play a good card game - like true friends, do not leave. King of Hearts brings me up to $ 10 per day. At the same time, I myself do not play it. I play Deberts.

Advertise in free games

I have two types of ads, banners and fullscreen.
Banner ads hang around the bottom of the screen, 320 by 50 in size, many players are so used to it that they feel uncomfortable when there is none.
Full-screen, in turn, are divided into static screen (Interstitial) and a few seconds video.
This season, the so-called rewarded video appeared - that is, the user is invited to watch a video clip, for which he receives delicious cakes.

Banner advertising

Brings $ 14000- $ 16000 per year.
The most effective banner advertising was and is from Google - called adMob. It hangs at the bottom of the screen and sometimes slows down the gameplay. Average earnings of $ 0.20– $ 1.00 per thousand impressions (called eCpm). This season, the new Appodeal pick appears , which raises the eCpm by half. The mediator is not a replacement for adMob. The mediator shows ads from all sites, playing it through the auction.

In 2015, I installed the apodilsky SDK for 4 applications and doubled the revenue from banner advertising. In 2016, slowly translate all the games for them. Probably.
Appodeal has several advantages - 1) easy integration. The code itself takes 5 lines!
Judge for yourself, AppDelegate.m do this:

#import <Appodeal/Appodeal.h> @implementation AppDelegate - (BOOL)application:(UIApplication *)application didFinishLaunchingWithOptions:(NSDictionary *)launchOptions { // Appodeal SDK Initialization [Appodeal initializeWithApiKey:@"4333538d3f034056f26f72dd3e9a75a00c3dfc19856ee135" types: (AppodealAdType)(AppodealAdTypeInterstitial | AppodealAdTypeBanner)]; return YES; } 

Add two lines-functions to the ViewController.m file:

 #import <Appodeal/Appodeal.h> -(void) showInterstitial { [Appodeal showAd:AppodealShowStyleInterstitial rootViewController:self]; } -(void) showBanner { [Appodeal showAd:AppodealShowStyleBannerBottom rootViewController:self]; } 

2) plus - the withdrawal of money through anything, including paypal . There is no lower limit for the withdrawal amount.

Minus - thick SDK . It significantly increases the weight of the application.

Fullscreen static ads

Brings $ 2000- $ 2500 per year.



I used to only use Chartboost. Now there is a choice. The Appodeal Mediator also automatically connects full-screen ads. Alas, I do not yet have statistics on which service is better in efficiency. Time has turned off the trigger. Time, time is needed. Feels like, both services are approximately equal. But Chartboost has days when suddenly, bang! and throws out $ 30 daily earnings with a crazy eCpm = $ 200 !!!

Apparently, one of the players did not just look at the screensaver - but also installed the advertised application on his iPhone. No, well done! I love these.

Rewarded video

I will stop in more detail, because the thing is new for me.
This year I implemented two versions of the award-winning video in several projects - one from Chartboost, the second from Appodeal.

Appodeal rewarded video

In Appodeal, you have to do all the strapping yourself. That is, it is necessary in the application to make an invitation screen to view the video, for viewing which to give the player cakes.


Figure 4. Appodeal rewarded video

See, the left screen of image 4 is made by me personally on the side of the application. After pressing the button, a short video is shown (middle screen of image 4) and at the end of the video a static picture is displayed (the right screen in image 4). The event that the video is uploaded to the device, the developer has to check himself manually. Of course, this is a primitive function call, but it’s not very clear to me what conflicts can occur on a slow Internet, how to synchronize the process of watching videos and getting cakes.

Chartboost rewarded video

Chartboost this year has released a new SDK for watching videos.


Figure 5. Chartboost rewarded video

On the server side, you set up a page where you can watch videos in exchange for cakes. You can change the text and image (image 5, left picture).
As a result of watching the video, a static screen saver falls out (picture on the right) and a delegate event comes to the program that the video has been successfully viewed. Handle the event is not difficult.

 /* * didCompleteRewardedVideo * * This is called when a rewarded video has been viewed * * Is fired on: * - Rewarded video completed view * */ - (void)didCompleteRewardedVideo:(CBLocation)location withReward:(int)reward { NSLog(@"completed rewarded video view at location %@ with reward amount %d", location, reward); ViewController *vc = (ViewController*)self.window.rootViewController; [vc addCoins:reward]; 

There are nuances.
When you connect Chartboost you want to copy a 100-line text wrapper, which is surprising.

Conclusion

Of course, both integration approaches rewarded video have their pros and cons.
I use both. If I'm too lazy to register Chartboost in an application, I use Appodeal, it is the least expensive in terms of integration time.

At the end of 2015, I have 60+ live apps, of which 19 brings more than $ 1 per week, 11 - more than $ 1 per day.

Hope the information was helpful. Happy New Year, guys.